Attachments in Bundles

Introduction

Any current Selection can be saved as a Bundle. This section tells you how to save Bundles. A Manual section called Working with Bundles explains what you can do with them once saved.

There are two possibilities when you save a Bundle:

•

There are no Attachments

No Item in your Selection is linked to any other Item in the Case as an Attachment. In this event, there are no options - the only thing you can do is choose to give the Bundle a meaningful description in place of its default description.

•

There are Attachments

One or more Items in your Selection is linked to another Item in the Case as an Attachment. If such links exist, then various options arise for handling the attachments, ranging from sophisticated marshalling of children vis à vis parents at one extreme, to ignoring them at the other.

Reminder

Attachments are a special kind of Item Link. The term denotes narrowly the relationship of parent document and child document (e.g. a mail message and a Word document sent with it). A large section of this Manual is devoted to Attachments and other Item Links.

Within that section there is a page called Handling Attachments which serves as the introduction to this specific aspect. It is worth reiterating that involving Attachments adds a layer of complexity which is extremely versatile when you need it, but which can be ignored completely if you do not need it.

How to Save a Bundle

Where the Bundle has no Attachments

Make a Selection and press <Save> from the Control Panel. A box appears, where possible with a default Description corresponding to the Query Statement seen in the Query Wizard. You can rename this with a Description such as “Papers sent to Counsel in January”. Press <Save>.

In most cases, that is all there is to it. A message tells you that a Bundle has been saved and gives you its Bundle Number. If you now take <Bundles> from the Control Panel, you will see your Bundle in the list on the Bundles Screen. The section called Working with Bundles tell you what you use it for.

Where the Selection includes Attachments

The system detects whether any Item in the Selection is related as parent to any other Item in the Selection or in the Case.

A brief reminder of the Attachment concepts may be helpful here. An Attachment might or might not itself be part of your Selection. One of the features of Openlaw is that you should not have to code an attached document in the same way as its parent - a disclosable parent may have an Attachment for which privilege is claimed, for example. The functions involved in saving Bundles, and for printing lists or bundles of images of documents, allow you to decide at that point whether Attachments are brought into play regardless of their coding.

One of the possible outcomes is that an Item - a document - is both in your Selection in its own right AND is also an Attachment to something else. The options described below allow you to decide whether such documents appear once or more than once, and where they lie in the sequence.

You first see the same screen as is shown above, with the option to give the Bundle your own description. Then you go to this:

It gives you three broad options as to what is to be done with Attachments and, where relevant, options for positioning child Attachments relative to their parents. There are several permutations and some of them automatically exclude others.

Option 1 - Do not add in any Attachments to the Items in this Selection

Bear in mind that the Attachments which you might add in are those which, whether or not they are included in the Selection in their own right, are those which might optionally be brought in (and possibly brought in more than once) because they are child documents to Items which ARE in the Selection. This is explained more fully below. The option not to add them is the default which, if taken, by-passes a more detailed set of questions about the inclusion of Attachments.

Positioning of any Child Items

In this context (where you have chosen NOT to add in Children which are NOT in the Selection), the Child Items referred to are those which met the search criteria for the Selection along with their parents. The default position for such Items is that which is dictated by the Index Order chosen in your Query. You can vary this by opting to position them after their parent Item (or, if they are children to more than one parent, after their first parent to appear in the Bundle).

Why is this helpful?

A spreadsheet saved on 1 July is attached to an e-mail message of 2 July. A date order Selection which includes both Items will place the Items in their chronological order. You may, however, want such Items to appear after their parent, so that the "story" unfolds in the order in which the participants saw it.

The limitation to the first parent means that no Item will appear more than once in the Bundle and you will therefore be able to load the Bundle to view it (Bundles in which any Item appears more than once are called PrintBundles and can only be used for printing image Bundles).

Option 2 - Set rules for adding in Attachments to Items in this Selection

Note: In this context, as elsewhere, distinguish between:

•	a document which is a Child to another document AND IS ALSO in the Selection
•	a document which is not in the Selection but which is a Child to a document which IS in the Selection and which can, if you so elect, be brought into the Bundle, or appear in a Report or a print run of images whether or not it is in the Bundle by virtue of its link to a Parent.

This is the route to a more detailed screen (explained in a section called Attachments in Bundles and in the sections called from that page). Here you can set rules for Items which are marked as Privileged or which are not marked In List.

You now see an advisory message as to duplicates which is not relevant to the first option.

It is not known at this point whether duplicates will in fact result from your choices - that may turn on the options you take on the next screen. Which option you take will depend on the purpose of the Bundle. If you want to see each document once and once only, in the first place in which it turns up in the "story", then you will take up the suggestion made in the message

Note that it may take some time to save a large Bundle with Attachments.

Once you have pressed <Save>, you will be asked if you want to save with the Bundle any Attachments to Items. You are asked about this if any Item in your Selection has an Attachment. This subject crosses several functions and is described in a section called Attachments in Bundles and in the sections called from that page.

Option 3 - Limit the Bundle to Parent Items only by dropping any Child Attachments to Items in this Selection

This option will exclude from the Bundle any Item which is a Child to any other Item in the Selection. This is potentially a wider exclusion than Option 1 - that merely bars the bringing in of extra Items whereas Option 3 will reduce the Selection by leaving out all Children.

Why is this helpful?

For a formal list of documents and for trial bundles etc you may well want Attachments to appear as often as they appeared in the "story", subject to the rules about duplicates. On a first pass through a new set of documents, however, lawyers generally want to see a document once and once only in order to make primary decisions about it. The option to drop any document which is a Child to another document in the Selection will achieve this. The Children can be retrieved by loading the Bundle and re-saving it with Attachments using Option 2.

The sub-option as to positioning of Child documents is obviously not relevant once you have chosen to drop all Children, and that option is unavailable.

Note that the exclusion of Attachments from a Bundle does not prevent you from navigating to Attachments from a parent Item (see the Manual section Item Links Tab) nor listing them as indented Items below their parent in a Standard Report (see the Manual section Attachments in Reports). It simply means that the Attachments will not actually be stored in the Bundle as separate Items in their own right.

Tip

By default, Bundles are listed alphanumerically by Description, so the name you give them will dictate where they appear in the Bundles window and anywhere else where you can see lists of Bundles. This also allows you to group Bundles together by giving them the same initial words.

You can edit Bundle descriptions later. In the Bundles window there are a variety of ways of indexing them. See the sub-section Managing the Bundles Collection in the Manual section Working with Bundles.